In my area, rural Ireland, there are still a few old style shops(stores). These places usually feature long wooden counters, glass fronted cabinets, mechanical tills! and floor to ceiling shelves. The shop are usually smallish (around 300sq ft), and fairly dark (the windows are usually full of merchandise) and the ceilings are often smoke stained wood.

This type of business is rapidly disappearing, being replaced with modern self service convenience stores, or not being replaced at all; having been driven out of business by a supermarket.

So I wanted to do a project which would capture the inside of a few of these places for posterity.

I have a few specific question about this project, but any other advice would also be welcome.

What's the best way of approaching the shop owners to ask for permission.

What about lighting? I have a speedlite. Or should I go with long exposure & natural light? I would like to capture the owner and maybe customers. Ideally I don't want to fool around with a complicated lighting setup and interfere with business.

Lens: Wide angle seems like the only option for these small spaces?

Here is a photo by a flickr user of the kind of shop I am talking about. This shop doubles as a pub, this was pretty common in small towns.

This is a youtube video of a famous comedy sketch (very funny) set in a very old style shop. These kind of "sell everything" stores are very rare these days, if any one knows of any in South-east Ireland, let me know.

I like your question. Can you tell us where you plan to post the results?
–
AJ FinchJan 27 '11 at 13:39

1

@AJ Finch, Will probably put them on flickr. I won't be starting the project until April when I'll have a bit more free time (and there's a bit more light at this latitude). I'll post a link here when I start to post.
–
KenJan 27 '11 at 13:54

4 Answers
4

Most shop owners would be open to the idea, if you can explain it to them in advance, so I'd recommend just approaching them, possibly by giving them a call in advance to speak to the owner (assuming most of these are owner-operated).

With regards to lighting, I would suggest that using the ambient light where at all possible, as this will capture the atmosphere. You might need to use a wide aperture (which shouldn't be too much of a problem with depth of field, when using a wide angle lens) or bump the ISO up a bit. Of course, the ambient light will be better at different times of the day -- East facing will be better in the morning, West in the afternoon.

Others have suggested using available light wherever possible, but I would like to add a slightly different take.

If you can use strobes sensitively, you can use them to enhance the atmosphere and feeling of a place so that some shots are capturing character rather than documenting in a purely journalistic fashion. This probably wouldn't be appropriate for all images, but for a few I think it would add some depth to the project overall.

I would advocate a tripod instead of a fast lens for this sort of project. "Wide" and "fast" don't really go together unless you invite their cousin "really expensive"... a slow wideangle and longer exposure should do the job more cheaply, I can't think why you'd want to limit depth of field in a wideangle shot.
–
Matt GrumJan 27 '11 at 13:16